Scalable Support of Interdomain Routes in a Single AS

Cristel Pelsser, Akeo Masuda and Kohei Shiomoto

The Internet has grown extremely fast in the last two decades. The number of routes to be supported by the routers has become very large. Moreover, the number of messages exchanged to distribute the routes has increased even faster. To keep up with the increase, network operators regularly have to perform costly upgrades of the routers. It is unclear whether advances in hardware will be able to keep up with the increasing routing load. More importantly, the large number of routes and iBGP messages negatively impacts iBGP convergence time leading to long connectivity losses.
In this paper, we propose a scalable way to support the Internet routes in a Service Provider network. We make use of distributed servers that select routes on behalf of the routers. Then, routes are stored in a Distributed Hash Table (DHT). We adapted the concept of DHT for that purpose. Each router maintains its share of Internet routes in addition to a cache of routes currently in use to forward the Internet traffic. We call our proposal SpliTable. We show that our proposal is more scalable in the number of routes supported in each router than current iBGP route distribution solutions. Moreover, the number of control messages exchanged with our proposal is bounded contrary to current sparse iBGP route distribution solutions which may never converge.
In Globecom, 2009.